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<div><h2 class="title">
<a name="spade.foreword"></a>Foreword</h2></div>
<div><div class="author"><h3 class="author">
<span class="firstname">Gustavo</span> <span class="surname">Aranda</span>
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<div><p class="pubdate">Valencia, October 31, 2007</p></div>
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<p>The idea of a Jabber-based agent platform appeared one night
	at 4 A.M. when, studying the features of the Jabber architecture,
	we found out great similarities with the ones of a FIPA-compliant
	agent platform. The Jabber protocol offered a great architecture
	for agents to communicate in a structured way and solved many issues
	present when designing a platform, such as authenticating the users (the agents),
	provide a directory or create communication channels.</p>
<p>We started to work on our first prototype of this Jabber-powered
		platform and within a week we had a small working proof of concept by the name
		of <span class="emphasis"><em>Fipper</em></span> which eventually allowed for dumb agents to connect and communicate
		through a common jabber server.</p>
<p>Since that day, things have changed a bit. The small proof of concept
		evolved into a full-featured FIPA platform, and the new <acronym class="acronym">SPADE</acronym> name was coined.
		As usual, we later had to find the meaning of the beautiful acronym.
		We came up with <span class="bold"><strong>S</strong></span>mart <span class="bold"><strong>P</strong></span>ython multi-<span class="bold"><strong>A</strong></span>gent <span class="bold"><strong>D</strong></span>evelopment <span class="bold"><strong>E</strong></span>nvironment,
		which sounded both good and geek enough.</p>
<p>We hope you like this book and have as much fun using it as we had writing it.
	Of course we also hope that it may become useful, but that is a secondary matter.</p>
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